![]() During my two-week stay, Martin Luther King day was celebrated in the United States, and the American embassy in Tunis asked if I would speak briefly at the consulate in honor of that occasion to an audience of Tunisians. The poem is not hard to understand, but if we do not read it slowly and carefully we miss the many perceptions that are embedded within it.Ī story about this poem: Many years ago I was invited to give a series of lectures and seminars in Tunisia. It is, at the same time, a great poem.Īs you will see, it runs counter to our prevailing sense that poems should often be difficult, that the knottedness of their thought should in some way mirror the deep ambiguities and ironies of our deeper thinking about human existence. The poem which I discuss here is one of them. The midcentury African-American poet Robert Hayden wrote a number of poems that deserve to be in the canon of our nation’s finest works. He was, in my deeply held view, one of the greatest Americans. ![]() I loved Frederick Douglass, both his autobiography and his speeches. ![]() Many years ago I taught courses in black American literature. ![]()
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